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Recommendations around the world are interesting. In my Northern European corner of the world co-sleeping is very typical and even recommended. We are also instructed to wash babies' butts after every poo with water only (no wipes), and the put them outside to sleep in a pram basically whatever the weather.
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Jan 22, 2024 13:43
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Parenting advice zealotry is people trying desperately to maintain an illusion of control over a terrifying high-stakes crapshoot. ...while a little human being shoots crap at you.
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Jan 22, 2024 13:51
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Chillmatic posted:Parenting advice zealotry is people trying desperately to maintain an illusion of control over a terrifying high-stakes crapshoot. but but but but I did a thing and now everything's different with my tiny human who changes on a daily basis
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Jan 22, 2024 14:07
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That's probbaly it. You get so lazer-focused on finding The One Crazy Trick to make your baby sleep/eat/grow/not cry/not die that having multiple okay choices is unfathomable.
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Jan 22, 2024 14:26
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morothar posted:Our daughter got a random unicorn plushie for her 4th birthday that happens to look like a character in a series of Polish children’s books that deal with emotions. What series is this? We have Kicia Kocia books and would like some other recommendations. I don’t speak Polish - my wife’s is first-generation and all of her relatives speak it, so we are trying to see if we can get more books given that she’s such a sponge at this age.
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Jan 22, 2024 14:50
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morothar posted:I’ve convinced myself that SIDS is a late-stage capitalism ‘disorder’ that largely affects poor people. Digging into the stats seems to support that impression, but it’s not like I have time to run models. Yes, this feels right quote:Similarly, I don’t get having kids sleep in their own bed at a young age. It feels profoundly off “anthropologically” if that makes sense? But then, lots of things that humans did for (tens of) thousands of years were. And this feels wrong. But, I'm just a parent frustrated at the amount of baby min-maxing that assumes there is some way of raising a more perfect human. We do lots of things that we're not even aware of that will probably have an even bigger effect on our kid than many of our conscious efforts. The more I parent, the harder I find it to poo poo talk how other people parent, at least until their kids hurt my kid.
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Jan 22, 2024 15:21
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morothar posted:I’ve convinced myself that SIDS is a late-stage capitalism ‘disorder’ that largely affects poor people. Digging into the stats seems to support that impression, but it’s not like I have time to run models. My rudimentary understanding of SIDS. I am a dumb person on the internet and am not claiming any of this as fact 1. Sleeping on back is less comfortable than all other positions for babies 2. If baby has the wrong genetics and gets too comfortable sleeping overnight, they stop breathing and die 3. We don’t know which baby has the wrong genetics, so assume they all do and make slightly uncomfortable sleep the best practice My issue with this, and again I am just an idiot on the internet, is when you have babies with GERD or other conditions they are always uncomfortable to a degree and usually don’t sleep soundly anyway regardless of their position. Obviously back sleep has reduced the cases of SIDS but I think it's too aggressive for the scope and current understanding of the problem.
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Jan 22, 2024 15:30
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What an idiot baby, forgetting to breathe at night. Signed, a person who stops breathing at night without the assistance of a machine strapped to my face.
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Jan 22, 2024 15:33
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Make informed choices that best suit your own life and style but I don't think I'd ever forgive myself if I knowingly ignored advice just to catch some better Zs and was one of the unlucky statistics. I'm loving exhausted but I know it'll pass.
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Jan 22, 2024 15:39
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Thread got kinda agro over night yikes Anyways these discussions always remind me of a picture my in-laws have of my wife sleeping as a baby. She's in a crib that's got blankets tucked all around the inside and a little blanket on top of her, sleeping face down with 2 stuffed bears in there with her. She survived but there's no way in hell I'd let my baby sleep like that.
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Jan 22, 2024 15:52
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My daughter stayed over at Nana's house this weekend and talked about how nice Nana was to let her stay up real late, until TEN THIRTY ...we're just like yo that's when you finally loving go to sleep on a school night after an hour and a half of "bedtime"
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Jan 22, 2024 16:02
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My take is that we've come to a point in US culture where parents' mental and physical health are ignored unless there is an unarguable direct impact on the kid. I'm pretty drat sure that many medical professionals would recommend pregnant women to have 8 months bed rest in a padded room on a diet of sterilized mush if exercise didn't have such a strong correlation with better outcomes. The only examples of "consider your own needs" I can think of are for when people are already at the breaking point, like leaving an inconsolable infant in a crib for five minutes if you've tried everything and are getting angry/desperate. For everything else you get "make time for yourself".
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Jan 22, 2024 16:07
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Our neighbor loves to brag about how his kid is an educational prodigy with advanced STEM skills. He’s also a teacher who wants my kid in his class. No thanks - I’m happy your kid is smart but we don’t need direct comparisons benchmarked against them.
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Jan 22, 2024 16:18
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I have never really had any anxiety my entire life, not even nightmares until I had kids. I get extremely anxious over my kids safety and have nightmares about them all the time to the point I have to consciously calm myself down when I start going over the line to helicopter parent type behavior. I fully understand why all this worry over safety exists and goes so far. The evolutionary urge to protect them from even the tiniest harm is insane. The real question is not why we do it but wtf previous generations didn't.
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Jan 22, 2024 16:25
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Shifty Pony posted:The only examples of "consider your own needs" I can think of are for when people are already at the breaking point, like leaving an inconsolable infant in a crib for five minutes if you've tried everything and are getting angry/desperate. For everything else you get "make time for yourself". My favorite is "sleep when the baby sleeps". Yeah sure okay let me just take a nap while doing 60 on the highway. Don't bother pulling over because they'll wake up the moment that car stops. Which is irrelevant because they're not allowed to stay in the carrier too long so they're supposed to come out as soon as you reach your destination. And if you're home? You're not allowed to sleep while holding the baby, but the baby won't sleep unless they're being held. It's so easy, just put them down drowsy. Then pick them up because they're inconsolable and rock for a solid half hour until they calm down, then you get the reward of repeating the cycle until you give up and do something you're not supposed to for the sake of survival. I'm convinced the majority of parenting advice comes from people with the 1% of perfect babies who need nothing.
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Jan 22, 2024 16:37
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morothar posted:On a more upbeat note, the malleability of children doesn’t cease to amaze me. Our daughter got a random unicorn plushie for her 4th birthday that happens to look like a character in a series of Polish children’s books that deal with emotions. Is this series available in English and if so what is it called?
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Jan 22, 2024 16:44
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Re: unreasonable expectations and breastfeeding/supplementation: one thing we didn't realize is until talking to our OB afterwards is that in California (and I think other states), hospitals are graded by the state on a metric of pure breastfeeding rate as part of being certified "baby-friendly". This is why they'll offer donor milk sometimes (which doesn't hurt the metric) but not formula supplementation. It has literally nothing to do with an evaluation of what's best for your baby: as we discovered with #2, the moment the baby goes to NICU and its more convenient for them to just push formula they do it lickety split.
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Jan 22, 2024 18:17
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G-Spot Run posted:I don't think I'd ever forgive myself if I knowingly ignored advice... and was one of the unlucky statistics. This is the root right here. Shame, anxiety, guilt....When something terrible or traumatic happens to a kid (or honestly any loved one in our lives) it's perfectly normal to wonder what you could have done differently. The truth is that no matter the precautions taken there is nothing that will protect you the pain and guilt from that question. That doesn't mean forget about trying to protect your kid...I just think that it's a place where trying to understand why we're doing something and what's motivating our behaviors as parents matters a lot. Is this something I'm doing to primarily protect my kid or is this something I'm doing primarily to protect myself in case the-worst-imaginable-thing happens? If it's the latter, simply acknowledging that goes a long way toward cutting back on the authoritative-toned shaming advice leveled at others when people ask for advice.
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Jan 22, 2024 19:32
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nesbit37 posted:Is this series available in English and if so what is it called? So turns out, it’s French. The author is Aurélie Chien Chow Chine, and the series is called “Little Unicorn”, in Polish “Uczucia Gucia” (Gucio’s feelings) Exhibit 1 re anger in English: https://a.co/d/2F2TblU And in Polish: https://www.empik.com/uczucia-gucia-jestem-zly-chien-aurelie-chine-chow,p1221907303,ksiazka-p EDIT: For us, safety is an exercise in total system optimization: there’s no point in maximizing a theoretical sleep safety number, only to crash the car the next time you drive because you’ve also maximized your degree of sleep deprivation. Or let the baby grab a knife because you were too tired/slow to react. You expose the child to risk all the time. Those of us who had small children as Covid started literally had to sit down and plot out the area under the limits imposed by income risk / health risk / developmental risk / etc. morothar fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 19:37
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morothar posted:For us, safety is an exercise in total system optimization: there’s no point in maximizing a theoretical sleep safety number, only to crash the car the next time you drive because you’ve also maximized your degree of sleep deprivation. Or let the baby grab a knife because you were too tired/slow to react. I did some policy advocacy about the impact of sleep on mental health (used to work in mental health advocacy), and it's deeply harmful how much our society dismisses the need for adequate sleep, treats wanting/needing enough sleep as some kind of indulgence and sign of laziness, and ignores the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation. I'm not sure if it hits other parents as hard as it hits me, but if I don't get enough sleep, especially over a long period of time, then my ability to regulate my emotions drops. Driving a car becomes dangerous. I'm a worse parent. Our advice to parents around safety and risk never take parental needs into account. It's just expected you'll bootstraps your way past basic human needs. I don't like when folks act as if bedsharing is better than or just as safe as solo sleep or that solo sleeping is traumatizing in some way. But at some point we started bringing our kid into the bed (usually not starting the night in our bed though) because we both work and need sleep to survive, and he sleeps through the night in the bed. We have a firm mattress and created a clear space, but it is a risky choice. It was really different having advocated about maternal mental health screening and intervention, and then having a kid and realizing how much our systems actively discourage pregnant people and mothers from getting their needs met to help their mental health. Mistaken Frisbee fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Jan 22, 2024 |
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Jan 22, 2024 22:11
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Mistaken Frisbee posted:I'm not sure if it hits other parents as hard as it hits me, but if I don't get enough sleep, especially over a long period of time, then my ability to regulate my emotions drops. Driving a car becomes dangerous. I'm a worse parent. Very soon after our son was born we realized sleep deprivation hits me particularly hard and had to change up our originally planned routine accordingly to get me more sleep. I felt like a lovely parent and spouse for a while but different people have different strengths and it's ok if every aspect isn't a 50/50 split.
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Jan 22, 2024 23:30
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Mistaken Frisbee posted:I did some policy advocacy about the impact of sleep on mental health (used to work in mental health advocacy), and it's deeply harmful how much our society dismisses the need for adequate sleep, treats wanting/needing enough sleep as some kind of indulgence and sign of laziness, and ignores the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation. I'm not sure if it hits other parents as hard as it hits me, but if I don't get enough sleep, especially over a long period of time, then my ability to regulate my emotions drops. Driving a car becomes dangerous. I'm a worse parent. Preach. Put this is da OP. Sleep deprivation hits me pretty sneakily, it's like being mildly intoxicated. I was in a conference call for work the other day and I started rambling and mumbling complete gibberish because I couldn't physically get the words out as fast as I was thinking them.
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Jan 22, 2024 23:46
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Jose Valasquez posted:Big same. Yeah, at some point my wife agreed to take over all overnight duties (not in the newborn stage, much more recently when he sleeps through most of the night) because I just wasn't coping well with switching off every other day and going to work. I am good with diapers and bathtime and tasks that require energy and struggle, but sleep difficulties are harder for me and don't seem to bother her as much. My mother-in-law watches him during the weekdays and gets up early with him, and my wife felt like it was a fair trade if I just take the mornings on weekends and other days she's out. I just try go to bed earlier on those days and she gets to sleep in, and she's good with that. I actually don't think I have it hard at all for a parent, but considering how many things still feel difficult, I genuinely can't imagine being in a one-mom family with an unsupportive male partner and surviving it. I see a lot of moms in that boat and even one kid takes so much teamwork to not just survive it, but actually do the things everyone asks of you.
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Jan 22, 2024 23:47
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Mistaken Frisbee posted:Yeah, at some point my wife agreed to take over all overnight duties (not in the newborn stage, much more recently when he sleeps through most of the night) because I just wasn't coping well with switching off every other day and going to work. I am good with diapers and bathtime and tasks that require energy and struggle, but sleep difficulties are harder for me and don't seem to bother her as much. My mother-in-law watches him during the weekdays and gets up early with him, and my wife felt like it was a fair trade if I just take the mornings on weekends and other days she's out. I just try go to bed earlier on those days and she gets to sleep in, and she's good with that. Towards the end of our latest family trip over to Europe, I thought I had a bona fides heart attack. Turns out, it was a panic attack from taking on too much during our vacation: shared equally in the parenting load, but was basically the sole driver as we were going all over the country. Additionally, I took our daughter on a trip over to the continent - which involved 2x sole-parent flights and 12 hours of driving in continental Europe over two days. I used to be so impervious to sleep deprivation and stress that my wife’s comment after the cardiologist visit back in the states was “congrats, turns out you’re human” Watch yourselves y’all. Also, single parents, I have no idea how they do it.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:29
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morothar posted:single parents, I have no idea how they do it.
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Jan 23, 2024 00:59
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My daughter has come over to specifically fart next to me twice this evening. They are really bad right now, thanks kid!
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Jan 23, 2024 01:04
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devmd01 posted:My daughter has come over to specifically fart next to me twice this evening. They are really bad right now, thanks kid! Just do it back
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Jan 23, 2024 01:19
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Jan 23, 2024 02:12
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El Mero Mero posted:This is the root right here. Shame, anxiety, guilt....When something terrible or traumatic happens to a kid (or honestly any loved one in our lives) it's perfectly normal to wonder what you could have done differently. The truth is that no matter the precautions taken there is nothing that will protect you the pain and guilt from that question. I definitely should have quote posted or added more context but I was very much responding to the suggestion that back to sleep is too much effort vs good sleep quality is better.
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Jan 23, 2024 03:13
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so, i think my just-turned-3 year old is like....experimenting with the emotion of sadness? She's on track developmentally and always has been, and can mimic and express all sorts of emotional states, but in the past week she's doing what i can only describe as practicing being sad. Like, practicing exaggerated sad faces, different intensity and vocalization of pouts, dramatically walking out of a room and sitting on her bed. These are all things she's done before with similar triggers or circumstances, but it feels alot like playing because shes never seriously upset or unreasonable and really enjoys when mom or i play along and walk her through the situation. Tonight, she hid under a blanket and said 'I want to be alone' in a silly voice, but i could clearly tell it was performative, and we had a totally normal and fun halloween story session under there. Maybe not experimenting, but she's really indulging herself when it comes to the sad end of the spectrum, and not all of it is 100% sincere (or so it feels to both mom and me). Is this crazy? Is this a thing that happens? Shes never been a depressed, stressed or anxious kid, but there is more tension in the house with her little sister demanding more of our attention, so it might be as simple as that. meanolmrcloud fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Jan 23, 2024 |
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Jan 23, 2024 03:24
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She might just be experimenting with it, yeah. Our two year old has recently been demanding that I draw sad or angry things, mostly sheep but also various Bluey characters.
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Jan 23, 2024 04:03
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Yeah I think they're just experimenting with emotions. This is fine. If it makes you feel any better they're functioning at a very high level if they've identified this and are mimicking it at 3
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Jan 23, 2024 05:43
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Why go out to a nice dinner when you can instead drop $60 on an urgent care visit because your kid refuses to have problems when their PCP is open That thumb-sucking blister went from ‘looks a tiny bit pink but nothing bad’ at 3:30pm to ‘oh good god is that gross’ at 6pm.
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Jan 23, 2024 05:47
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Has anyone experienced childhood anxiety in their kiddo? My wife is the one who takes our daughter (5) to school in the mornings and pretty much every morning she says her tummy hurts and doesn't want to go to school. But once she gets there she's completely fine. The other day as I was taking her to dance class, she was saying each bump in the road was hurting her tummy, but was fine once we got there and ran around for a few minutes before class started. Though she ran out about 15 minutes in crying because her tummy hurt and sat on my lap for a few minutes. We have an appointment with her doctor today. She eats pretty healthy, and is quite regular, so I'm not suspecting gastro issues. But her running out in the middle of class was the first time she's had issues like that. My wife does take medicine for general anxiety, which made me begin to think it was something related.
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Jan 23, 2024 11:13
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Saturday we had kiddo's birthday party at some place. When loading up the car afterwards, I hadn't secured his giant #5 balloon correctly. It got caught in gust of wind and flew off into the sunset to go kill a turtle or two. There's something very visceral about losing a balloon like that. I don't even like the balloons, they're a giant waste of space and money in order to take up space in my dining room while setting off the motion detector on my alarm system when I forget to shunt them. They float there being a burden until mid-march when I can usually get away with pop and chuck without anyone noticing. But watching that balloon float away, it felt so loving bad, I was unreasonably upset about it. It wasn't even my balloon! I figure, there's a ton of other balloons so he's probably not going to notice so I keep quiet about it. So naturally the moment we got home he looked at me and asked where his #5 was, forcing us to face the uncomfortable truth. When I broke the news he just fuckin sobbed and it drove my dad guilt into overdrive because it was 100% my fault. The guilt got to me so bad that after work I swung by party city and bought a new one. gently caress man, when I got home and gave it to him the smile on his face was just the best. This morning grandma came over to take him to school and the moment she walked in he immediately started with GRANDMA GRANDMA DADDY GOT ME A NEW BALLOON! I'M SO EXCITED! YOU YOU WANT TO SEE LET ME SHOW YOU LET ME SHOW YOU. This fuckin kid, I don't know if he's a master manipulator of my emotions or I'm just a giant sucker but getting a new stupid balloon was totally worth it.
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Jan 23, 2024 13:39
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Renegret posted:Saturday we had kiddo's birthday party at some place. When loading up the car afterwards, I hadn't secured his giant #5 balloon correctly. It got caught in gust of wind and flew off into the sunset to go kill a turtle or two. There's so many problems we're exposed to in the world that we can't do a drat thing about. It's really great to be given a problem you can solve and then feel like it really did matter
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Jan 23, 2024 14:25
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thunderdome winner
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The Toddler has now slept through the night for two nights in a row, and gently caress me, what a difference seven hours of uninterrupted sleep makes.
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Jan 23, 2024 14:33
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Just tell me you have to poop bro
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Jan 23, 2024 14:56
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Brawnfire posted:Just tell me you have to poop bro can you check my butt there's poop in it
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Jan 23, 2024 14:59
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#2 born yesterday. So far so good. I'm sleeping any little chance I can get to stay fresh. He's pooped like 10 times already today!
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